There are a number of different proposals which have been put forward in an attempt to obviate the disadvantages of the use of hard cash in day to day financial transactions or periodic transactions such as the payment of monthly expenses and the like. These disadvantages are clearly the danger of either losing hard cash or being defrauded, or simply robbed of it. Many of the proposals have involved the use of electronic wallets such as smart cards in which electronic cash is loaded and which are unloaded as the electronic cash is spent by transferring the electronic cash held in the electronic memory of the wallet to a recipient's device such as another smart card in which an electronic memory is present. Whilst these arrangements do have certain advantages over the use of hard cash the electronic wallets themselves are always susceptible to theft or being lost and also need to be re-loaded from time to time.
As a consequence, other proposals have been put forward which involve the direct debiting and crediting of a client's bank account (as broadly defined herein) at the instance of the client himself and from a remote location. These arrangements are becoming more appealing as they obviate the obvious dangers of any type of physical entity serving the purpose of an electronic wallet.
One form of device that has been proposed as a device for effecting remote transfer of funds from one account to another is a mobile wireless device, more particularly mobile telephone, and especially a cellular telephone.
Clearly, the bank account number of both the account to be debited and the account to be credited must be available for use whenever a transaction is to be carried out and, as a general rule, the conventional bank account numbers are complex numbers created to comply with banking numbering standards. Such numbers are thus generally rather difficult to remember. Of course, certain of the numbers may be retained in memory in the electronic device being used to effect such remote transfer of funds but there will be numerous occasions in which the number of one party will have to be conveyed to the other party.
Also, the more sophisticated systems which have been proposed do not wish to limit access to such banking facilities to the exclusive use of a single electronic device such as a mobile wireless device. Their aim is to provide greater flexibility so that, if the electronic device is stolen, malfunctions, or is simply not available, the client can still access the relevant bank account to conduct financial transactions by way of other communications devices such as a computer and modem; a land-line, a call centre or other device capable of communicating with the bank's computer system by way of wireless or hard-wired connections. However, in order to do so, the client must have the relevant bank account number available and the best method of ensuring that it is available at all times is to remember it. The problem is that the complicated numbers allocated to bank accounts in accordance with banking numbering standards are extremely difficult to remember.